Prior to Big City Greens, he began his career working on short films with the intent to be a filmmaker, but ended up going back into animation when working on the Nickelodeon series Harvey Beaks as a writer.
In addition to animation, he has worked with his brother Chris on the Image Comics series Reed Gunther and writing stories and illustrating art for comics based on The Simpsons, Adventure Time, SpongeBob SquarePants and Peanuts.
Tropes associated with Shane Hougthon's works:
- Descended Creator: Voices Wholesome Greg, Don, and various characters on Big City Greens
- What Could Have Been: He and Chris had pitched
a pilot to Disney TVA called Welcome to Simpleton about a small town in the woods inhabited by a bunch of simple Muppet-esque characters, but was rejected. - Write What You Know: Much of Big City Greens was heavily based off of his and Chris' experience of their early life, who both grew up from a rural Michigan area, and had moved to city like Los Angeles after graduating college, as what they claimed to be much of life changing difference between learning about the urban life from rural life, for example, they mentioned about the hairstyle that Cricket has, is what Chris wore as a child as well as the name that also came upon as well as the character, while Bill was loosely based off their father-in-law while Gramma Alice was based off of their real life grandmother, who also had the same name as the character, and had lastly mentioned about the Greens Family pets, Phoenix, a dog similar to the creator's dog that they had, while the cat was similarly compared to the their grandmother's cat, while Tilly was lastly mentioned of being amalgamation, who they remembered her being similar to a numerous of neighbors they knew of.
